Endtown by Aaron Neathery for April 29, 2016

Two more transformations coming our way :)

So “Disease Control” ended up in charge of Topside.

So now we know when the Lt and the Rat Cop got “the bug”.

I hope Holly is hunkered down in the field quite a ways away. Good thing she didn’t turn into a giraffe.

Maybe historically the first time the Topsiders’ suits have been seen…

So, Topsider suits were initially Disease Control outfits, maybe? Either that, or APEX knew what was coming and was already preparing for the inevitable dust up that was inbound. How mysterious.

So what’s the symbol on the side of the police car? The little that’s most visible looks like a skirt, and a hand dropping an acorn…

I know Holly is hiding or she would never have gotten status as a major character, but I’m still on tenterhooks until Monday.

Hide, Holly, hide!

great back story Aaron….I suspect that now we will be moving forward??

For Sale By Owner. Needs minor repairs. Handyman Special!

Is that a PT with legs?

Well, makes sense that Topsiders suits are standard issue hazmats.

It looks like an eagle tail with a talon dropping an acorn. Standard iconography for a small country. A lot of state/county squad cars have the state and the state or county emblem on them.

I wonder if the cops will be carrying a mouse back to their station? It looks like they left a door open.

Now, which one of those cops will mutate into a jackass?

Would figure they would be the last humans alive after it all.Sort of Monsters, Inc but without Sully and Mike. Unless the cops names are Sully and Mike???“We got a Code 9132 here…..Contact with a monster!”“Close all shops in the mall, secure the animals in the zoo…..and cancel the three ring circus!!”

Someone asked me if I was getting sneak previews from the great Aaron Neathery…I WISH!!!

No doubt the officers came to question Holly. If anyone sees Holly the mouse and recognizes her hairstyle…Trust me. Like I said on Wednesday, her suffering has only just begun…

What controls when a person mutates? It seems Holly changed right after being with her snake friend. Then Lyn changed after being with mouse Holly. Was it coincidence?

Coffee Turtle, the cops who stopped by this am to question Holly said it had been a week since Ethels disappearance. I’m voting on every explosion making the mutagen more viralent, and Lyn and Holly were exposed a while ago. Holly was reexposed when she visited Ethel. I blame the buddy bombs.

Did anyone else think “oh…crap” when they saw the last panel?

My first thought was “Oh Shihtzu!”My second was that the TS transporters went from flying vans to crawler treads, which seems like a step down. The lords of the topside have always acted as though the end of human civilization didn’t affect them. The new rocket, the ginormous drones and the new airships seem to suggest that they have nearly unlimited resources at their disposal. Thus it seems a little strange for their PTs to go from flying to tank treads.

Ok, Apex made the mutagen. Apex made the BuddiBombs. And, Apex developed a disease control unit to cover up any evidence of Apex’s involvement in these “outbreaks”. Lyn had been in direct physical contact with the mutated cop a few months earlier and didn’t mutate himself after that. Apex gives him a job, and he and Holly can afford to move into a better neighborhood, whose husbands presumably work at Apex, too. Ethel and friends probably received the BuddiBombs from the Apex employee’s shop, at the standard employee discount, and gave the bombs to Holly, who then had them where they could be in contact with Lyn. If you follow the path of the bombs, it’s the same as the mutation vectors. Analysis – the mutagen got into the box of BuddiBombs from the baby shower, and Apex knew this.

Regarding the disease spread and who infected whom, I would expect that the mutagen takes about a week to “incubate” and if Holly was infected through Ethel, then she would have infected Lyn almost as soon as she returned home, hence Lyn’s mutation only lagged Holly’s by a few hours at most.Regarding the suits, it would make sense that the Topsiders started out as just part of Disease Control, and it would explain why they are so obsessive about destroying all mutated humans. It’s a kind of mass hysteria which has made them blind to the “bigger picture” and caused them to fixate on nothing else.

So many questions…are these guys in the Topsider suits anybody we’ve met somewhere in our past but their future?…are they here to quarantine, or are they here to collect brains?…where is Holly now?.,.where are Wally and Company?

@Robert Norwall If you enlarge the strip, you can see the door image is the same image that is on the officers sleeves! It is a BIRD of sorts and there are 4 acorns surrounding the bird. Don’t know the meaning still, but at least it is a better mental image to consider!?

By move forward I meant catch up with Wally, Kirbee, & Chic…..which I wonder where they have been observing all this from….. things are starting to come together for our inadvertent heroes.

Regarding the spread of the mutagen:

It’s rather obvious that it has spread from a number of different places, otherwise where did the “cop monster” come from? And given Apex’s quick and overwhelming response to it, they were obviously prepared, so it wasn’t the first, and they weren’t using half measures to combat it. And given the amazing amount of thick black smoke (indicating lack of complete combustion) coming from the back of the house, I can’t imagine that that Lynn’s demise isn’t going to cause even more outbreaks. Multiply that by numerous car and plane crashes by other people transforming, and all hell is going to break loose (as in Sparkplug’s flashback).

Regarding the “monsters”:

Although Aaron describes them (in his About Endtown blurb) as “bloodthirsty monstrosities” (and some might very well be bloodthirsty), consider the following. Someone transforms, an obviously fear-inducing, possibly painful process, with adrenaline and other hormones no doubt altering the morphology as it progresses, and discerns what they have become. They appear to be something out of someone’s worst nightmares. Depending on their form, they make not even be capable of discernible speech, i.e., grunts and screams may be all that they can manage to utter. Now consider that they might want to beg someone “normal” for help. All that normal person would see is a shambling monster coming towards them with dangerous intent and horrific vocalizations. So everyone seeing them flees in terror, but the poor transformed person is just trying to communicate, or perhaps simply trying to flee and hide. But fleeing in one direction may very well turn out to be towards someone else. The “monster” is thus “rampaging”. Furthermore, having acquired a different, often much larger, form, the “monster” is not familiar with how to move gracefully in their new body. Thus, more “rampaging” descriptions. And if they witness someone else transforming into a “monster”, they may very well be frightened of the “monster” they are encountering and either defend themselves from it, or cause more destruction trying to flee from it. Basically (other than from the Apex bigwigs who may have wanted to cause or to take advantage of the situation), everything becomes a lose-lose situation, with fear governing everyone.

Regarding what comes next in this ditto replay:

I wonder if Aaron is coming to show us what happens in Pep Stadium (with Holly possibly being rounded up there for destruction) since the hero of Pep Stadium is Walt Trimble (the big, huggable bear) who ends up being the mayor of End Town.

I am looking forward to seeing what he decides to tell in this story, but I think some tears are very likely to accompany what I am reading.

Well done, Aaron.

Cops appear to be surprised at seeing CDC at this event, which means they didn’t make a big appearance at Ethel’s blow-out. What the difference this time? Is Holly already inside the containment box, shown in frame 2? That’s more likely then having her hop over Lyn’s carcass to escape through the hole in the fence. She probably doesn’t think of Apex as something she has to escape from yet. Her upcoming stay with Apex could be what gives her a phobia of imprisonment and hatred of topsiders that we see full-blown later. And where is the real Holly? Hasn’t been so much as a squeak out of her yet.

And so it has begun…

The cop may just be guessing it’s Disease Control. The Apexers just aren’t correcting them.Anyone else get that “apex” means “topside”?

Who is to say that Apex doesn’t run Disease Control? Given what we’ve seen of Apex’s activities in Bordavia, they seem to be involved in more things than a government contractor is allowed to get into in our reality. It has often been speculated that the TS started out as some faction of Apex. Beyond the fact that their symbols are similar, it would explain why he TS have access to all the best toys.It makes sense that the Topsiders would have started out as Apex disease control. They would already be sealed up in biosuits when the plague hit and they might have been able to find lots of people who hadn’t mutated yet like Linda Kowolski and get them into some sort of safe area.I also wonder if disease weren’t setting resources aside in preparation for this epidemic. That would explain how they were able to build massive fleets of PTs, that second rocket and the drones.